Burnham, Baby, Burnham
The people of Makerfield have come down with a peculiar condition. They’re hot, bothered, and they’re feeling strangely sick.
That’s right: they’ve got Burnham Fever.
We joke, of course. But Andy Burnham’s sizable victory in last night’s by-election confirms what we said in these pages a few weeks ago. Burnham, a tireless retail politician of the kind they seem incapable of making on the Left anymore, happy to gladhand in innumerable community centres and football clubs and Big Tescos, is likely to be the next Prime Minister. The people of Wigan have made it so.
There are things to discuss that are not related to the man himself. Reform’s underperformance was real, and the fielding of a historically weak candidate no doubt played a part. Burnham was clearly the beneficiary of an enormous amount of tactical voting on the left. Restore Britain is not going away. Starmer, for his part, has made it clear that he does not plan to either, at least without a fight.
It is undignified to ask the man who led Labour to their greatest general election victory in a generation to simply slink away. But Starmer, a man with the rare and unenviable talent of making even his greatest passions feel focus grouped, has little choice: go gentle into that good night, or rage against the dying of the light, and lose monstrously and unforgivingly. It’s what we might call a Comms-22: do you want to be seen choosing to give up, or would you like to be seen giving up forcibly and humiliatingly?
Burnham, for his part, is aware of this. This morning, as the alleged-Prime Minister-elect heralded his new dawn from behind the impenetrable walls of the M62, one would’ve been mistaken for thinking you were watching the Ford inauguration. Our long national nightmare is over, he might as well have said, for everyone not named Keir Starmer.
There is, of course, the small issue of Wes Streeting, who is elsewhere, running something akin to the Muppets Babies version of a leadership contest on his own terms. But the battle lines are drawn, the contenders now confirmed, and the country faces either a summer of briefing and counter-briefing, or, perhaps, a swift, merciful coup, where the King in the North makes it quick and keeps it clean.
Jumping on the banned wagon
The under-16s social media ban is a media minefield. Whichever way you turn, someone has an opinion on a very complex issue, and it descended into a shouting match where participants are all in on emotional arguments. It’s been brewing for months, ever since Australia took action back in December.
Disagreement might be rife, but a rough consensus holds that big tech has engineered these platforms to be highly addictive and children are vulnerable. But just as social media was thrust on us, so now is the decision to cut off children’s access, or at least that’s the theory.
Because once you get into the weeds, treating all social media as one thing guarantees disagreement. The ban sweeps in Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X, platforms with very different wrinkles. Of all the big boys, many would agree Reddit and YouTube are two of the ‘better’ ones - heavily moderated, that can act as a powerful educational resource. Yet YouTube has been banned while, for now, Reddit stays. And whichever side of the fence you fall, the platforms trading in parasocial dynamics - X, Instagram etc - are the ones more readily linked to harm. Conflating these two has its shortcomings, with X running very loose on content restrictions, while Meta manages Instagram more tightly.
Amid all this complexity, most of the reporting has hardened into two grooves. Big tech is lobbying hard: YouTube and Meta warned that a blanket restriction could push children into unregulated online spaces (the more we hear this, the more meaningless it becomes). And every piece reaches for Australia, while the evidence remains inconclusive, especially when you hear that roughly 70% of Australian parents polled in March said their children were still on the platforms, bypassing the age gates.
This leaves the government’s handling. On the surface, the politics are easy - more than 90% of consultation respondents backed an under-16 minimum. Dig down though and age verification means handing ID checks to the very tech titans in the dock, and approval drops sharply. We want children kept safe, it seems, right up to the point where it asks anything of us.
Trump’s Treaty of Versailles?
As more questions emerge around the details and implementation of the US-Iran memorandum signed earlier this week, the irony [or accuracy, it remains to be seen] of its signing at Versailles seem lost on the President.
Declaring that the outcome would amount to “unconditional surrender” by Iran as well as “regime change”, Trump leapt to Truth Social to defend the deal after Iran’s Supreme Leader sneered that he’d struck the agreement “out of desperation.” Trump’s clapback “We didn’t meet out of desperation, Iran did. They are FINISHED!” convinced no-one.
Tehran’s portrayal of the deal as an American surrender has been bolstered by critical analysis which points to a $300bn recovery fund and scrapped sanctions as evidence of Trump’s need to end an unpopular war before the November mid-terms. Cynics have also suggested that Trump is simply bored and wants to focus on Russia.
Today’s signing ceremony in Switzerland was abruptly postponed amid fresh Israel-Hezbollah strikes in Lebanon (ceasefire now declared), further fuelling naysayers. Iran’s murmurs of introducing tolls to the Strait of Hormuz despite Trump’s emphatic rejection is further evidence of the memorandum’s fragility.
With inflation rates high and costs higher, Trump’s words have done little to assuage the crowd, despite the horrors of Iran’s regime, its framing of Trump as ‘desperate’ in these negotiations just might stick. Hopefully so does peace.
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